Philip F. Kennedy Knihy

This interdisciplinary collection of essays advances the study of anagnorisis («recognition»), a quintessential concept in Aristotelian poetics. This book explores narrative structure and epistemology by examining how anagnorisis works in narrative fiction, music, and film. Contributors hail from the fields of cinema; opera; religion; medieval and modern English, German, and French literatures; comparative literature; and Indian (Sanskrit) and Islamic (Arabic) literatures, both classical and modern.

The authors of this volume are some of the principal scholars of the field of Medieval Arabic literature and include Stefan Leder, Julia Bray, James Montgomery, Michael Cooperson, Daniel Beaumont and Dwight Reynolds. The book is a natural complement to Stefan Leder’s Story-Telling in the Framework of Non-Fictional Arabic Literature*, and furthers our understanding of some of the issues dealt with in the earlier tome. It deals chiefly, and variously, with the rhetoric, semantics, epistemology and humanistic mythology of narrative in the canon of Adab (medieval Arabic Belles Lettres) and related narrative literatures. “What is fiction (or fictional)?” and “What is Adab?” are essentially hanging questions that shape or affect the essays in various ways; literatures dealt with include: the Iqd al-Farid of the Andalusian humanistic writer Ibn Abd Rabbih; the Arabian Nights; the pre-Islamic Battles Days of the Arabs (Ayyam al-Arab); manuals of dream interpretation; historiography; stories of the signs of Muhammad’s prophetic vocation; early Islamic travel accounts; and hagiographical writing.